A Karate Lesson

I do karate. I train regularly every week, and I've been doing it for about 4.5 years. Last night, our class of about 25 people split up into pairs, and we did controlled sparring (fighting) for about half an hour. Each fight lasted about 4 minutes, and I think we had about 7 matches each, with a different partner each time.

If you're fit, and you've been doing karate regularly, a few sparring matches shouldn't be difficult. But the real test of stamina comes in at the last few matches, once you've already had at least 5 good, hard fights. You're feeling exhausted; your body is shouting a loud 'NO MORE!' at you, and you'd like to just sit down and rest until the lesson is over. But your mind knows you have to go on. You didn't think you could push yourself this far, but, as you do it, you see that you're able to draw energy from somewhere, and you're able, somehow, to keep fighting. And if you're up against a good, strong fighter, you *have* to carry on, because if you don't you'll get hurt. Mind over matter, or at least over body.

As I drove away from our dojo (training hall) last night, I suddenly had a new insight into life. Life is like a whole string of karate fights: each challenge that we experience in serving G-d is a fierce battle between our Yetzer HaTov, the 'Good Inclination', the side that wants us to connect to G-d and His desires of good for this world, and our Yetzer HaRa, our 'Inclination to do bad', or to abandon G-d and His desires, and rather to focus on more selfish, personal desires. Even if the pressure of our situation comes from external factors, eg. a person that we have great difficulty tolerating, but with whom we are forced to interact, bad traffic in the morning, making us late for work / studies, or anything else, we have to understand that the real struggle of how to react to this pressure is happening inside ourselves. The different forces are fighting each other, deep within the juncture between our soul and our body.

And, some fights are easy. When things are going well for us, when we're happy, feeling on top of things, feeling good about ourselves, then the fight is a lot easier. But when we're tired out from all our previous fights, or we're feeling down, or miserable, or we've taken a knock by someone who hurt us, this is when the fight is really hard. We have so much more to overcome, now, in order to emerge victorious over the forces that pull us so tenaciously away from the path of doing right. And just like in karate, when your body is telling you that you've simply had enough, you can't take anymore, you physically are not able to stand up there, put your hands up, and fight -- so too in these challenging situations, our Yetzer HaRa tells us that we simply can't put up with this strain, this pressure, this hardship. And, just like the karate fight, we have to keep fighting. We can't give up.

And I thought to myself, imagine if the fights of our lives that G-d really cares about are the ones that happen right at the end of our strength, when we're tired, broken down, miserable, down. Imagine G-d's voice coming to you, as your strength seems depleted, saying, "Don't give up now! Now is where the real fight is! Yes, you did well with the others. But now, when it hurts, when it's hard -- now is when I'm really watching anxiously to see how you'll do."

This makes a lot of sense to me. The Ba'al Shem Tov says that everything we see and hear contains a lesson for us to internalize; there's a reason that we were exposed to that experience. And I think that here is a lesson we can learn from a karate fight (or any other kind of physical fight): even when you're worn out, exhausted, broken, you still have to get up, put your hands up, and fight! This is where it really makes a difference; and this is where you'll really grow, if you draw on your extra reserves of energy, fortify yourself, and carry on.

(Image from this site)